From Glastonbury to Bestival: a family festival survival guide

Get down, don’t get grumpy... we present top tips for taking your family to a
music festival, where normal parenting rules don’t apply

Best seat in the house: a child enjoys the music at the Wilderness Festival, Cornbury Park, OxfordshirePhoto: Rex

By Michael Odell

7:00AM BST 21 Jun 2014

The first time I took my children to a festival we’d been on site perhaps half an hour when eight-year-old Tommy came stumbling over the tent ropes, boggle-eyed with a major discovery.

“Come quick, you’ve got to see this! They’re arresting a man made of chocolate!”

Generally I’m not keen on performance art. But I was pleased my boy was being inspired, so I abandoned my wheelbarrow of Pot Noodles, hurried past the goat curry stall and the woman de-stressing in a bath of lentils and joined a fast-gathering crowd.

There, stumbling and falling, his hands raised in supplication to the jets of two carefully directed water cannons, was a young male reveller. But he wasn’t being arrested and he wasn’t made of chocolate.

He had fallen asleep while sitting in a Portaloo and, having slumped forward against the door, he’d managed to tip the entire cubicle over. Security weren’t arresting him. They had dragged him out and were hosing the contents of the septic tank off him to forestall an outbreak of festival cholera.

Crouching on haunches, holding a small child by the hand and explaining curious events like these are, for me, the bread-and-butter work of a parent at a music festival.

“Listen, son,” I said. “For this weekend only, everything I have ever told you about how to live in the 21st century is wrong.”

Old hand: writer Michael Odell with his children at Womad

Music festivals are really a counter-factual historical experiment. When you buy a family ticket you are saying, “OK, kids, this is what it would have been like in Neolithic Britain, living as part of a savage, itinerant tribe rather than a nuclear family, with all the food, hygiene and noise abatement issues that would entail.”

Of course, you wouldn’t have Beyoncé’s helicopter landing in a field next to your tent or pay £9 for a hog roast in Neolithic Britain, but you take my point. A music festival is a voluntary suspension of all you hold dear about modern life. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take steps to enhance your chances of survival.

First, when you arrive, don’t make the festival virgin’s error of assuming that “Family Camping” signs mean: “Here are families camping.” People in wizard hats will walk into your tent circle and, with an amiable “We’re all in this together” shrug, walk off with your bottle opener, your Cath Kidston folding chair, even your evening meal.

One evening at Womad I followed the mazy, faltering progress of a young woman across the Family Camping field towards our barbecue. Her bearing suggested someone about to borrow Dijon mustard. But no, on arrival she snapped the elasticated waistband of her baggy festival trousers in a determined manner, grabbed some cutlery and joined the queue at the griddle. Then, having surveyed the meat on offer, she stuck out her paper plate.

“Give me a couple of the big ones from the back,” she said. That’s the thing about Family Camping. You become so confused as to who is actually in your family, you simply give your sausage to the first person who asks.

Feral: the crowds at Glastonbury (ALAMY)

But “General Camping” has its own dangers, for here be teenagers. I went to Reading once, my worst festival experience by miles. It rained every day and on the second night I wrote a letter home that wouldn’t be out of place in the Imperial War Museum’s archive of First World War correspondence. (“Darling, I don’t know if I shall make it out of here alive. The sickly sweet stench of Portaloos is everywhere. Last night I have to tell you we took an awful pounding by the Arctic Monkeys. Unbelievably after such a barrage I have to report there were no actual hits. I am almost out of muesli. I would give anything for an Ocado delivery but supply lines are blocked by the Sugababes’ very badly parked tour bus. Yours etc.”)

Anyway, I was woken at 4am by rustling among the food bags. I seemed to glimpse orange fur and wild animal eyes. “Oh my God, there is a fox in my tent,” I thought and reached for a camping implement. But then the fox spoke.

“Hi. I’m Otto. Look, I’ve had rather a lot to drink. Just finished A-levels at Downside. Not a lot of alcohol there so it does tend to affect me rather. I am terribly sorry but this looks remarkably similar to my tent. Except, of course, I realise now I don’t eat muesli.”

I’m glad Otto made himself known, because I was about to beat a very expensive education out of him with my special fold-up frying pan.

You must stay calm at a festival. There are a lot of young folk like Otto who have just done exams and been released into the wild. The rule is, as an adult, you must not do silly things too. So for example, at Womad I noticed that while my twerking to the Drummers of Burundi was getting a good reaction from my eight-year-old, the older two were scandalised. Caitlin tugged at my sleeve informing me in a terse whisper: “Please Dad, stop. People are uploading you on to YouTube.”

The same applies to radical festival views. The danger is that after a few beers and half an hour of trying to get into New York punk band Cerebral Ballzy, you feel the need to explain to your children that, aged 40-plus, you have seen the greatest era of pop and this isn’t “proper music”. Don’t do it. Clap along. For actually the scourge of terrible young people’s music may soon be over.

A couple of years ago, a friend went to the Coachella festival in California. It was notable for a star turn by the rapper Tupac Shakur, despite the fact that Tupac had been shot dead in 1996. Through the wonders of technology, his hologram did a duet with Snoop Dogg.

Fun in the sun: take steps at festival to ensure your 'chances of survival' are high, says Michael Odell (ALAMY)

Holograms of dead legends may well be the future of festivals. One day, perhaps, Elvis or Michael Jackson holograms will headline Glastonbury (imagine the backstage VIP area, with mean-looking bodyguards flanking a memory stick or offering it a flute of champagne).

Your children will love going to a festival with you. It means you have not given up. It means you are prepared to spend a weekend unwashed, unshaven and even pretending to be totally relaxed when being served falafel by someone with face tattoos.

But don’t try too hard. Don’t get your hands patterned with henna. Don’t buy an ethnic coffee table or let someone realign your chakra with hot housebricks. Most important of all, don’t try too hard to bond with your children. One year at the Isle of Wight festival the Foo Fighters began playing one of my favourite songs. So I did what any dad would do. I ran at my daughter and hoisted her into the air.

“Come on, they’re doing Everlong! Get on my shoulders!” I shouted. “No. I’ve just had a beanburger,” she replied tartly. Like a fool I persisted. There was a tussle. I got her halfway airborne but in her struggle to get down I accidentally tossed her into a gang of Hells Angels.

I was quite relieved to see security arrive with their water cannon.

Essential tips for the festival virgin

1. At Glastonbury, bleating an ill-informed “That was brilliant!” about a band is not enough. You must make proper reference to the greatest festival performance ever. Just add “… but obviously not as good as Radiohead in ’97.” There. Everybody’s stopped staring.

2. Don’t try to impose a curfew, even at 4am. “Look, do you mind taking that racket somewhere else, my children are trying to sleep” is not appropriate and not even true. Check their sleeping bags. They have filled them with empty Red Bull cans and are going mental in the dance tent.

3. When Michael Eavis launched Glastonbury in 1970 it cost £1 to get in and everyone got free milk. However, do not start complaining that festival ticket inflation is therefore running at 21,500 per cent . He gives a lot of it to charity.

4. Look out for holograms. Most artists at festivals are real. But some may be dead (see main article). However, if you bump into Lily Allen buying a hot dog, do not try to stick your finger through her face and then pass it off with: “Sorry, just wanted to see if you were a hologram.”

5. On departure don’t ring Lost Property and say: “Excuse me, I think 10,000 people have forgotten their tents.” Festival-goers really do just abandon them.

6. Do not try to arrange an Ocado delivery to your tent. This is not like home where you may bask in a certain prestige receiving a home delivery. People will attack if they see fresh on-the-vine tomatoes.